JEONA ZOLETA

Maria Jeona Zoleta, a graduate from the University of the Philippines in 2011, is one of Manila’s emerging young talents known for her provocative paintings and installations about spectular, new millennia information overload, and post-feminist takes on sexuality. She has exhibited widely in Manila and internationally. One takes from Jeona Zoleta’s paintings the myriad experiences of joy, pleasure, humor, and freedom. She paints with unbridled passion as seen through her expressive brushwork and multi-layered compositions. Zoleta employs colors that are bright and pure, neon or fluorescent, highly saturated and electrifying, to give the sense of media bombast. She aims to translate the speed of electronic media into the slow meditative vibe of painting. Much of her imagery is appropriated from popular culture: cartoon characters, teenage media celebrities, kids toys and designs, which she mixes with adult images on sexuality and various fringe culture. Zoleta is a child of the new millennium, a Y2k baby. Thus, her art merely represents the consciousness of her generation. This is the time of the World Wide Web, or the information explosion, where all things are given equal access and distribution.